Chapter 5: Against Medical Advice
The room had gone dark except for the spill of light from the corridor, the door left ajar by a nurse making rounds. Niles woke to the sound of tape tearing.
Gavin was sitting up, hauling the IV needle out of the back of his hand in one fast, practiced motion. Blood welled immediately, a bright bead running down toward his wrist, dripping onto the sheet.
"Are you serious right now?" Niles was fully awake before his feet hit the floor.
"I'm leaving."
"You're not leaving. You're on a drip, you idiot, you just ripped a hole in your own hand."
"It's my hand." Gavin swung his legs off the bed, and the moment they touched the tile his whole body listed, one hand catching the bed rail hard enough to rattle it. He breathed through it. Color left his face and came back grudgingly.
Niles stood there in the dark, in his river-smelling jeans and nothing else, and wanted to pin him to the mattress by pure force. "You can't even stand up."
"I can stand up fine."
"You're holding the rail like a lifeline."
"I'm holding the rail because you're standing there arguing instead of getting my pants." Gavin pressed the back of his hand against his mouth, a damp corner of sheet wadded against the needle hole. "Get the nurse. Get a wad of gauze. Something."
"You're staying."
"No, I'm not." Gavin looked up at him, and his voice came out low and even, which was worse than shouting. "I've been in this bed for two days, Niles. The walls are closing in. I can hear myself think in here. Get me out or I will crawl."
"That's a lie."
"It's not."
"You'd have crawled already if you could."
"Then I've got all night to try." Gavin's grin was thin and terrible. "I swore you wouldn't leave. Nobody said anything about me."
Niles pressed both palms against his eyes. The monitor ticked on, steady, indifferent. Somewhere down the hall a door closed.
"You're gonna sign yourself out against medical advice," he said finally. "They told you what happens. You come back in worse and they bill you double."
"They can bill me double. I'm not paying either way."
"You nearly died."
"That was two days ago. Ancient history."
"You are the single stupidest man I have ever loved."
Gavin's face did something complicated at the word loved, smoothed over fast. "Flattery. Get the nurse."
Niles got the night nurse, a heavyset man with tired eyes who took one look at the bleeding hand and the folded clothes on the chair and said, "You're checking yourself out."
"I am."
"You understand that leaving against medical advice means we can't..."
"Yeah, yeah. My risk, my signature. I've done this before."
"That's not comforting, Mr. Reed."
"It's not supposed to be."
The nurse cleaned and dressed the hand with a sour efficiency, printed the forms, and made Gavin sign his name three times while leaning on the overbed table because sitting up straight was beyond him. The discharge paperwork took twenty minutes. Gavin's signature started neat and degraded into a scrawl by the last page, and the nurse watched it happen and said nothing.
"Prescriptions," the nurse said, holding out a sheaf. "Pain management, follow-up on the sutures in five days, and a psychiatric referral that I strongly recommend you actually use."
"Sure," Gavin said, in the voice he used for lying.
The nurse looked at Niles. "Good luck."
"Yeah," Niles said. "Thanks."
The moment the door closed Gavin was pulling his shirt on, jaw clenched against the rib pain, and Niles watched him fight through it and win and hated every second of it.
"You can't walk to the elevator."
"Watch me."
"You'll make it to the door and collapse, and then I'll have to carry you through a hospital lobby, and I'm not dressed for it."
"Then think of something."
Niles looked at him. Looked at the door. Then he smiled, slow, and Gavin narrowed his eyes on principle.
"What."
"Nothing. Sit down."
Niles stepped into the corridor. It was past eleven, the halls half dead, a single orderly at the far station watching something on his phone with headphones in. The row of wheelchairs against the wall sat there like an offering. Niles took the closest one, folded the footrests down, and wheeled it backward into the room through the door.
"Oh no," Gavin said.
"Oh yes."
"I'm not riding a wheelchair out of here like an invalid."
"You ripped your own IV out and can't stand. You're an invalid. Sit."
"I will bite you."
"You did that already today. Sit down, Gavin."
Gavin sat. It took him a while, easing down into the plastic seat with his arm braced against the mattress, and when it was done he was gray around the mouth and breathing shallow, and neither of them mentioned it.
"I hate this."
"I know."
"If anyone films this it's going on the internet."
"Nobody's filming. Lean back."
Niles pushed him out into the corridor, quiet wheels on linoleum, past the dim nurses' station and the darkened rooms with their blue door lights. The orderly glanced up, saw a tall barefoot-looking man in bad jeans pushing a grinning tattooed guy in a hospital gown, and looked back at his phone. Elevator. Down two floors. The doors opened onto the empty main lobby, all marble and dying fluorescents, and Gavin tilted his head back against the chair and looked up at the ceiling.
"You know what's funny," he said. "I've done this before too. Different hospital. Different city. Niles wasn't even there."
"Who was?"
"Nobody. I signed out and walked eight blocks to score." He laughed, short and dry. "This is better."
"High praise."
"It's the wheelchair. Very dignified."
Outside the air was cold and wet and tasted like traffic, and Gavin pulled a long breath of it and let it out slow, his head dropping back against the seat.
"Okay," he said quietly. "That's the first good breath in two days."
The parking garage was three levels down and Niles had no car, because his car was at the house and his phone was in the river with everything else he owned. He stood at the garage mouth doing the math, and Gavin watched him from the chair, smug as a king.
"You're trying to figure out how to get me home and you've got nothing," Gavin said. "No phone. No cash. You don't even have shoes that match your dignity."
"I'll figure it out."
"You could call Hank."
"I don't have a phone."
"I do." Gavin fished in the pocket of the hoodie draped over his lap, the one Niles had carried from the house two days ago, and produced his own battered cell, cracked screen, alive. "Guess who remembered to pack."
"You're kidding."
"Called the nurse for you earlier on it. Been saving it like a trump card." He held it up. "Call Hank."
Niles took it and looked at the screen for a long moment. The contact list was five names deep and one of them was him, listed as N and nothing else.
"Calling Hank means Hank finds out we checked you out tonight."
"Hank's gonna find out either way. He'll be less mad if you feed him first." Gavin's grin came back, sharp in the orange garage light. "Besides, I want to go home. I want a real shower and real whiskey and to not hear a monitor beep."
"He's gonna say go back inside."
"He's gonna say a lot of things. Call him."
Niles dialed. The garage echoed with the ring, once, twice, and Gavin tilted the chair back on two wheels and balanced there like it was nothing, like his ribs weren't screaming, waiting for the voice on the other end.
"What."
Hank's voice was gravel and displeasure before Niles said a word.
"It's me. Niles. We need a ride."
"From where."
"St. Mary's."
A long silence on the line. Niles could hear him breathing, could hear the TV in the background die.
"You're telling me you left."
"Gavin left. I came along to make sure he didn't faceplant in a ditch."
"Put him on."
Gavin took the phone and held it to his ear, still balancing the chair on two wheels. "Hi, Hank."
"Don't you 'hi, Hank' me. You nearly died two days ago. You have bruised ribs and a hole in your hand."
"Had. Past tense. It's sutured now."
"I swear to god, Reed." A long exhale, the sound of a man aging in real time. "Fifteen minutes. Stay in the lobby where I can see you from the car. If you're not there, I'm leaving."
"He'll come," Gavin said, hanging up.
"He'll come," Niles agreed. "And he'll lecture the entire drive."
"He'll lecture for five minutes, then he'll ask if we need anything from the store. Watch."
He did lecture for five minutes. It ran from the hospital doors to the on-ramp, one hand on the wheel, the other gesturing with a half-eaten gas station pretzel he'd apparently been holding when the call came. Then he glanced in the mirror at Gavin, gray and grinning in the back seat with his feet up on the armrest, and something in his jaw gave out.
"You look like hell."
"I feel fantastic."
"That's the morphine talking."
"They stopped the morphine at checkout. This is just my natural radiance."
Hank muttered something that had the word "ambulance" in it and pulled onto the highway. Ten minutes of silence later, without turning his head, he said, "You need anything from the store?"
Gavin looked at Niles in the mirror. Niles looked at the ceiling.
"Cigarettes," Gavin said. "And don't tell Connor we left."
"Connor left this morning. It's just gonna be the three of us, and one of you is legally an outpatient." Hank drummed his fingers on the wheel. "There's whiskey at the house. Drink it slow, or I'll know."
Connor wasn't home. The living room held the debris of two days without him: dishes, an ashtray shaped like a skull overflowing, a blanket wadded in the corner of the couch where somebody had clearly slept. Gavin dropped onto the cushions and put his feet on the coffee table. Niles went to the kitchen and came back with the bottle and two glasses, and then, after a moment's consideration, went back for a third glass and left it on the counter for Hank.
"Pour," Gavin said.
"You're on pain meds."
"Was on pain meds. Past tense." He snapped his fingers. "Pour, Stern."
Niles poured. Generous. They touched glasses, and Gavin said, "To being alive," and drank half of his in one swallow, coughing after, hand pressed to his ribs, laughing through the cough.
"Idiot," Niles said fondly, and drank his own.
That was the pattern for an hour. Hank drifted in and out, depositing cigarettes, delivering two deadpan warnings, then retreating upstairs with his own glass and the sound of a baseball game turning on. By ten-thirty it was just the two of them on the floor, backs against the couch, the bottle lightened by half, Niles having dug out his stash bag from behind the couch cushions where he'd hidden it from himself in a moment of weakness. He packed the little pipe with hands that were only slightly unsteady, and Gavin leaned in for the first hit with his mouth on it like it was communion.
"To being alive," Gavin said again, smoke curling out around the words.
"You said that already."
"It bears repeating. Do you know how many people I've outlived? Actually outlived. My cousin. My guitar teacher. That guy Marco with the, what was it, the boat."
"You never told me about the boat guy."
"Marco had a boat and a drug habit and only one of those things floated." Gavin took the pipe back, held the flame to it himself this time. "Everyone I know is either dead or you."
"That's the loneliest thing you've ever said, and you once cried about your dog."
"I didn't cry about the dog. I cried because you laughed about the dog." He exhaled toward the ceiling. "Tell the bridge story."
"We've told the bridge story."
"Tell it again. I like the part where you were wrong."
Niles took the pipe, considered it, put it down. "Fine. Two years ago. I was up on the railing of the steel bridge, and this skinny guy in a leather jacket comes along and asks me if I'm going to jump or is he going to have to watch, because he's got somewhere to be."
"And you said," Gavin prompted, delighted.
"I said it was none of your business."
"And I said, it is my business, I've been on that railing three times this year and it's a lousy view." Gavin knocked his shoulder against Niles's. "I was baiting you. You looked so shocked. Like nobody had ever told you suicide was inconvenient before."
"You were high out of your mind."
"So were you."
"You talked me off the railing and then mugged me."
"I didn't mug you. I asked you for your wallet as a tip, and you gave it to me, which makes it a donation." Gavin's grin faded into something softer, more crooked. "You followed me for six blocks demanding it back. Six blocks. I kept walking faster. Finally I stopped and said, why do you care, and you said, because you're the only person who's talked to me in three days."
Niles went quiet. That wasn't the version he usually told.
"That's not how I remember saying it," he said.
"That's how you said it. Word for word. I kept the wallet for two weeks before I gave it back, and the cash was gone, and you never once asked about it." Gavin turned his head, eyes glassy and bloodshot and absolutely fixed on him. "You know what that told me? That told me you had money to burn and nobody to burn it on. Same as me."
"We're a real matching set."
"Cabinet finish. Limited edition." Gavin reached over and took Niles's cigarette out of the ashtray, took a drag, put it back in Niles's fingers. "Swear something for me."
"I already swore on Connor. There's nothing left to swear on."
"Swear on yourself, then. Swear we die young together."
"That's a terrible oath."
"Best oath I know. Everyone else promises to grow old. Look at them. Look at Hank, upstairs, drinking alone watching sports he doesn't care about. You want that? I want to go out at forty on a boat with Marco's name on it, completely wrecked, with you next to me complaining about the weather."
"You've thought about this a lot."
"Every night since the hospital." Gavin's voice had gone low and honest, the whiskey having stripped the armor off it. "Dying young together means neither of us has to bury the other one. That's the whole point, Niles. That's the romantic part. I've seen what losing you did to me for six hours. I can't do it for good."
Niles looked at him for a long time. The pipe sat between them, and the whiskey sat between them, and the house was quiet except for the muffled crowd noise from upstairs.
"Okay," he said. "Die young together. But you're buying the boat."
"Deal." Gavin lifted the whiskey bottle and drank straight from it, then passed it. "Now tell me a story I haven't heard. Tell me what you were going to do with the wallet money if I'd kept it."
Niles took the bottle, drank, and thought about it.
"I was going to buy groceries," he said. "And then buy more, in case you came back hungry."
Gavin stared at him. Then he grabbed the front of Niles's shirt and hauled him half into his lap, kissing him with whiskey and smoke on his tongue, and the couch creaked and the ashtray nearly went over, and neither of them stopped to save it.
The kiss broke apart on its own, Gavin dropping back against the cushions with a wheeze of laughter, one hand pressed to his ribs. "Ow. God. Never let me initiate anything ever again."
"Never," Niles said, settling beside him, close enough that their shoulders touched. He took a long pull from the bottle and passed it. "Worst fight we ever had. Go."
"Define worst."
"The one where something broke."
Gavin thought about it, eyes half closed, smoke drifting off the ashtray between his knees. "The Christmas one. Two years ago. You threw my phone out the window of the moving car."
"Because you were texting your ex while I was driving."
"Because you were jealous, is what you mean."
"I was driving, Gavin. You were telling some guy in Tampa what you were wearing."
"And you wound up and threw it out the window at sixty miles an hour, and then I grabbed the wheel." Gavin grinned at the ceiling. "We went sideways into a snowbank. You know what you said when we came to a stop? You said, with total sincerity, 'that phone was recyclable.'"
"I stand by it. I was still holding the wheel and you were still screaming."
"I wasn't screaming, I was mourning. That phone had my entire life on it."
"Your entire life was four contacts and a snake game."
Gavin laughed, a real one, ugly and loud, and had to ride out the rib pain with his teeth clenched, tears standing in his eyes. "Okay, okay. Worst one where I broke something. The apartment. I put your head through the drywall."
"You put my head through the drywall, yes."
"You said I was embarrassing you in front of Connor."
"You were embarrassing me in front of Connor. You were doing kickups on his coffee table and knocked the bong into his laptop."
"And you called me a charity case in front of everybody." Gavin's grin went fixed for a second, the old bruise showing through. "So I grabbed your hair. And you know what's the funny part? The drywall was the thing I had to fix. I spent a whole Saturday patching it. I hate tools. I've stolen three TVs and I've never once owned a screwdriver."
"You measured it wrong. It bulged for a year."
"It had character. It was our wall." He took the bottle, drank, wiped his mouth on his sleeve. "Overdoses. Go through mine."
"You want a list."
"I want a ranking."
Niles counted on his fingers, unhurried, the whiskey making his own list fuzzy at the edges. "The pills last week. The heroin, that was, what, four years ago, you were blue when I found you. The fentanyl thing. The time you mixed whatever that was with alcohol at North's party and seized on the lawn. And the one you don't count because you claim it was just drinking."
"The whiskey alone in the stairwell doesn't count."
"You were face down on the stairs, Gavin."
"I was resting."
"Between floors."
"Between floors," Gavin agreed, solemn as a judge, and then they were both laughing, helplessly, the bottle sloshing, Niles's whole body shaking against his shoulder. It had the hysteria in it, the edges of it, the sound of two men laughing at the thing that nearly got them, and neither of them tried to dial it back.
"Your turn," Gavin said finally, wiping his eyes. "Rank yours."
"The coke cut with something, the winter before Connor came home. I couldn't feel my arms for two days."
"That's not an overdose, that's a quality control issue."
"I woke up on the kitchen floor with the oven on and the door open and no memory of cooking."
"You weren't cooking?"
"There was a pot on the stove. It was empty. I still don't know what the plan was."
Gavin howled. "Empty pot. Four years of my life on that couch and you never told me the pot was empty. That's the funniest thing I've ever heard. That's better than Marco's boat."
"Marco's boat is better."
"Nothing is better than the empty pot. I'm getting it tattooed." He sobered by degrees, the laugh burning off, and turned his head to look at Niles properly. "The stabbing one. Tell it. You always tell it wrong."
"There's nothing to tell right. You got stabbed."
"Details matter. It was a bottle first."
"It was a bottle first," Niles conceded. "That guy at the docks, the one you shorted on the deal."
"I didn't short him. I convinced him the money had been shorted by the universe."
"And he broke a bottle on the table and you didn't even move. You just stood there being smug at him."
"Because I knew you were behind me."
"And then he put it in you instead." Niles's voice went flat without his meaning it to. "Three inches below your ribs. I put him through the folding table."
"Through the table, onto the concrete. Beautiful form. Ten from every judge." Gavin's hand drifted down to his side, tracing the scar through the hoodie. "And then you carried me eleven blocks because no cab would stop for two bleeding addicts."
"I couldn't lift my arms the next day."
"You held pressure on it the whole way and sang to keep me awake. Badly. Country music."
"You were going gray. I panicked."
"You sang 'Jolene' to a man dying of a bottle wound."
"The version I know, yes."
Gavin laughed until he couldn't breathe, and this time Niles laughed with him without any hysteria in it at all, just the plain stupid joy of the thing, both of them tilted together on the floor like a structure about to fail. Upstairs the baseball game muttered on. Somewhere outside a car alarm went and gave up.
"Look at us," Gavin said when he got his breath back. "Beaten up by each other, stabbed by strangers, dead three times each. And the worst part is we're the healthiest couple either of us knows."
"That's the bleakest sentence ever said in this house."
"This house has heard bleaker. This house watched you two brothers have a fistfight over who got to apologize."
"That was a difference of opinion about sequencing."
"Connor had a black eye, Niles. From a hug argument."
"He'd leaned into the wrong swing."
Gavin gave up, folding sideways into Niles's shoulder, shaking. The bottle sat between them, lighter by a third now, and Gavin reached for it one more time and then, deliberately, put the cap back on and set it on the couch above their heads.
"Okay," he said. "We die young together. But not this week. This week I want to see Connor's face when he finds out I checked myself out. He's going to do the voice."
"The disappointed voice."
"And you're going to stand there and let him do it, because you deserve it, and I'm going to enjoy every second." Gavin tipped his head back to look up at him, eyes bloodshot and warm. "Deal?"
"Deal. But I'm telling him it was your idea before you can spin it."
"Snitch."
"Survivor," Niles said, and put his feet up on the coffee table next to Gavin's, and the two pairs of boots sat there on the dead man's pretzel crumbs like the world's cheapest monument.
The lock turned at half past midnight. Gavin sat up so fast his ribs cracked like knuckles, and Niles reached out an arm on instinct, holding him steady.
Connor came in. Hood up, pale, keys still in his hand, looking like he'd walked there from somewhere much farther than wherever he'd been.
Gavin opened his mouth. Loaded it. Gavin had been practicing the reaction on the drive, actually, the whole arc of it, the mocking and the fake concern and the bit where Connor did the voice.
Connor looked at him. Looked at the whiskey. Looked at the pipe.
"Cool," he said.
"Cool?" Gavin blinked. "That's it? I ripped my own IV out. I stole a wheelchair. I did it all against medical advice, on camera, there's witnesses."
"Was it fun?"
"It was incredible."
"Great." Connor toed off his shoes without untying them and dropped onto the other end of the couch. He sat down like he was setting down something heavy, all at once, and his eyes were doing that thing where they focused somewhere six inches behind the world.
Gavin waited. Niles waited.
"You're supposed to do the voice now," Gavin said. "The disappointed voice. We had a deal. I told Niles I wanted to see it."
Connor turned his head slowly. For a second something moved behind his eyes, some flicker of the old machinery, the guilt or the anger or whatever Gavin had been counting on. Then it guttered out.
"I don't have it in me, Gav."
"You don't have it in you."
"It's midnight. I'm tired." Connor pulled his knees up, and the motion showed things the hoodie had been hiding. His wrists. The way the bones of them stood out like handles. He lit a cigarette with hands that took two tries at the lighter, and Niles watched the flame wobble and thought, with a lurch, of Gavin's own shaking hands two nights ago in the dark.
"He's thinner," Niles said quietly, in Hank's direction, up through the floorboards.
Gavin stared at Connor for a long moment. Then, because he was Gavin, because there was a mechanism in him that fired whenever softness got too close, he said, "Look at this. I nearly die and nobody makes a scene. There's no house style anymore. Two years ago that boy would've cried."
Connor took a drag. "Two years ago I thought people leaving meant something."
The room went quiet with it. Gavin's mouth, for once, had nothing loaded.
"He didn't eat today," Hank said from the stairs. He'd come down without anyone hearing, in a t-shirt and socks, glass in his hand. His voice had no anger in it, which was scarier. "Or yesterday, from what I can tell. His old man didn't eat either, so don't look proud of yourselves, the two of you matching outfits over there."
"I ate at the hospital," Niles said.
"Cafeteria potatoes don't count."
"Then what do you want from me, a menu?"
"I want you to look at your brother."
Niles looked. Connor had gone half horizontal against the couch arm, cigarette burning forgotten between two fingers, and there was a tremor in him now, small and constant, like a car idling badly. His cheekbones did the thing they did. The light caught them wrong.
Gavin got up off the floor. It cost him; his breath went thin through his teeth on the way, and Niles started to rise and got waved off. Gavin crossed to the couch and stood over Connor with the gray look of a man who'd been dead three days and knew exactly what the early version of it looked like on other people.
"Hey," he said. "When did you last eat? An actual thing. Food."
"Tuesday?"
"It's Friday."
"Time's fake." Connor didn't lift his head. "Don't start, Gav. You of all people."
"You're right. Me of all people." Gavin crouched down in front of him, elbows on knees, which pulled at the stitches and the ribs and made his eyes water, and he did it anyway. "I'm the last guy alive qualified to give this speech. I know the speech is garbage. But I also know what Tuesday feels like, Connor, and you're standing on the edge of it with both feet, and I've been there enough times to recognize the view."
Connor's eyes came into focus. On him. Actually on him.
"Your hand's bleeding through the bandage," Connor said.
Gavin looked down. The gauze had gone rust-colored at the heel of his palm. He laughed. "Yeah. Well. Family trait."
"Not really. I'm not actually related to you."
"That's the spirit."
Hank disappeared into the kitchen. Cupboards opened and shut. He came back with a can of soup, the pull-tab kind, and put it on the coffee table next to the ashtray, next to the boots, without a word. Then a spoon. Then he stood there with his arms crossed.
Nobody moved.
"I'm not doing the feeding thing," Hank said. "I did the feeding thing once. It's in the past. He's twenty-two. He can open a can."
Connor looked at the can. The can looked back. Something in his face caved, not dramatically, just a slow subsidence, like sand under water, and he reached out and picked it up and held it in both hands. It seemed to take most of his strength, holding a can.
"Open it," Hank said.
"I'm getting to it."
"Now."
Gavin sat down on the couch arm beside Connor, uninvited, close enough to be felt. "You've got exactly one good arm's worth of talking before I start doing kickups on your coffee table again," he said. "Open the can, kid."
Connor opened the can. The noise of it was absurd in the quiet room, that little hydraulic crack, and then he ate. Slowly. Four spoonfuls, five, the spoon clicking against the metal. Nobody watched him, which was the trick, all four of them suddenly very interested in the ceiling, the window, the hockey highlights nobody was watching upstairs. Six spoonfuls. Seven. He put the can down with half left in it and Hank, without a word, took it to the kitchen, and nobody said the thing about the half.
"Not bad," Gavin said. "Seven. That's a personal best for a Friday."
"Shut up."
"Make me."
Connor flopped sideways instead, head landing against Gavin's thigh, too exhausted to defend the space. Gavin went still, hand hovering, and then settled it, carefully, on top of Connor's hood like the whole thing was his idea.
"Still an asshole," Connor mumbled.
"Still check myself out of hospitals," Gavin agreed, and kept his hand where it was.
Niles caught Hank's eye across the room. Hank tipped his glass a fraction, an inch of acknowledgment, and went back upstairs, and the baseball game swallowed him, and the house did what the house did, which was hold.
They stayed like that a while, Connor's head heavy on Gavin's thigh, the ashtray filling, the clock on the wall ticking louder than anything upstairs. Niles repacked the pipe, tamped it down, and set it on the tray table within reach, the way you'd leave a glass of water by a sickbed.
Gavin looked at it. Then down at Connor. Something turned over behind his eyes.
"Hey, kid."
"Mm."
"You ever smoked this stuff?"
Connor opened one eye. "I'm not an idiot."
"That's not what I asked." Gavin's thumb moved absently against the top of his hood. "You've lived in this house two years. You've watched all of us go through it, night after night. And you never once reached for it. I've always wondered why."
"Because someone in this house has to stay slightly ahead of the reaper. It's a load-bearing role."
"That's a joke."
"Most things I say are jokes, Gav. You should write a paper."
Gavin reached over and took the pipe off the table. Held it in his lap, turning it, the lighter balanced on his knee. When he spoke again the flippancy had drained out of his voice, leaving the low, unhurried tone he used when he actually wanted an answer.
"It stops the noise. You know that, right? Whatever's in your head telling you you're a collection of bones wearing a hoodie. One hit and it just, it goes quiet. First time in my life anything did that."
Connor lifted his head off Gavin's thigh. His eyes went to the pipe, then to Niles, who had gone very still on the other side of the couch.
"He's not wrong," Niles said. "For the record. He's also not a doctor."
"He's an addict," Connor said.
"He's an addict who's honest for about ten minutes a day, and it looks like we caught the window." Gavin held the pipe out, bowl first, across the space between them. "So. One hit. Your first. I'd rather it was me handing it to you than you finding it in a coat pocket at some party where nobody's watching you."
Connor didn't take it. He looked at it the way he'd looked at the soup can, that slow subsidence in his face, the arithmetic of it happening behind his eyes.
"Why do you care what I put in my body?" he said. "You ripped your own IV out yesterday."
"Because I nearly died with my phone in my hand, texting you, and I couldn't tell you why." Gavin didn't blink. "And because I watched you eat seven spoonfuls like it was a marathon, and I know what it costs you to do that, and I know the only reason you do it is so nobody in this room has to bury you. That's a terrible way to live, Connor. I'm an expert. I've lived it for twenty-five years."
"Offering me drugs isn't care."
"Offering you drugs from this couch, at midnight, where I can watch you and Niles can watch you, is the only kind of care I know how to do without lying to you about it." Gavin's grin flickered, thin. "The lying version is where I tell you it'll all be okay and you should get therapy and drink water. You want the lying version?"
"No."
"Then here's the honest one. One hit. It'll feel warm. It'll make you hungry, actually hungry, like food is a good idea instead of a hostage negotiation. And tomorrow you'll be no worse off than you are tonight, which is the best deal anyone in this house has ever offered anybody."
Niles shifted. "Gav."
"I know what I'm doing."
"You're offering my little brother drugs on my couch while I sit here."
"I'm offering your little brother an evening where his head shuts up. You want to take it back from me, take it." Gavin kept his arm out, steady, the pipe sitting in his open palm like a card faced up on a table.
The room waited. The clock ticked. Connor looked at Niles, and Niles looked at the pipe, and whatever passed between the brothers had no words attached to it at all.
"One hit," Connor said. "And if I like it, you're never allowed to say I told you so."
"I promise nothing."
Connor took it. His fingers were steadier than they'd been two hours ago; the seven spoonfuls had done something, bought back a gram of grip. He held the bowl and stared into it like it might explain itself.
"Spark it for me," he said. "I'll inhale wrong and embarrass everyone."
"Not everyone. Just you." Gavin leaned in, cupped the flame to the bowl, and put his other hand flat on Connor's back between the shoulder blades. "Slow. Hold it. Don't cough into my stitches."
Connor drew. The first second was nothing, just smoke and the burnt-sweet smell of it filling the room. Then it landed. His shoulders dropped half an inch, a mechanical thing, like a hand letting go of a valve it had been holding shut for years. The exhale came out slow and shaking.
"Oh," he said.
"Yeah."
"That's. Huh."
"Welcome," Gavin said, and took the pipe back, and hit it himself, passing it to Niles without breaking the chain, the three of them sitting in a row on a couch built for two, boots on the coffee table, smoke climbing toward the ceiling in slow ribbons.
The noise in Connor's head did what Gavin had promised. It didn't die. It just moved to the back of the room, stopped making demands. He could hear the clock without it sounding like a countdown. His stomach made a sound, low and plain, the kind of sound a stomach makes when it's been forgotten.
"That's the hunger," Gavin said, not looking at him. "First warning. Eat while it lasts. It gets shy."
"There's half a can of soup."
"I'll allow it."
Connor got up, and the room tilted gently, pleasantly, the way a boat tilts. He walked to the kitchen steadying himself on the doorframe and came back with the can and the spoon and ate standing up, leaning against the couch, actually tasting it this time, the salt of it, the warmth going down. Niles watched him do it and said nothing to anyone, but his jaw worked once, and he had to look at the ceiling.
"Eleven," Gavin said, counting silently. "I saw eleven."
"Shut up."
"Make me."
Connor sat back down between them with the empty can, warm from the inside out, smoke still sitting in his lungs like a held breath he'd decided to keep. He looked at the pipe in Gavin's fingers.
"Not a regular thing," he said. "This."
"No," Gavin agreed. "This is a Friday thing. Special occasions. Near-death experiences, brothers coming home, Tuesdays where it all gets too loud." He knocked the ash out into the skull ashtray and set the pipe down between them, on the table, in reach but not in the way. "You know where it is. That's all. You know where it is and nobody here will ever tell you you're weak for knowing."
Connor pulled his knees up again. The tremor was gone, or hiding. Outside a car went past, headlights sweeping the ceiling and dying.
"Gavin."
"Yeah."
"That was the best few minutes I've had in about six years." He said it flat, eyes closed, hood up. "Don't let it go to your head."
Gavin looked at Niles over the top of him. Niles looked back. Neither of them smiled, exactly, but neither of them looked away, and the house went on holding, half a bottle lighter and one secret deeper, all the way to morning.
Morning came gray through the blinds, and the house slept like something sedated. Gavin and Niles had ended up horizontal on the couch at some point, boots off, heads at opposite ends, and Hank had stumbled down at four for water and gone back up. Nobody saw Connor stand at the fridge at seven a.m. with the door open, light spilling across his face.
He was hungry. Actually hungry, for the first time in so long he'd stopped remembering it as a state other people lived in. The smoke had done what Gavin promised, cracked the hunger out of hiding, and now it was standing in him like a shout.
He ate the way water goes through a burst dam.
First the rest of the soup cold, straight from the can with the spoon, then without the spoon. Then Hank's eggs went into a pan and came out buttered, two of them, then two more, toast dragging through the yolks, and the toast turned into the whole loaf, half a jar of peanut butter eaten with a butter knife in gulpless bites that weren't gulpless at all. He found the frozen pierogis Niles bought and forgot about. He boiled the whole bag. He ate them with his fingers over the sink, sour cream straight off the spoon between handfuls.
There was leftover rice in a bowl with cling film. He ate it with soy sauce poured in cold. There was a sleeve of crackers and a block of cheddar going stiff at the edges. A jar of pickles, brine slopping his wrist. The freezer yielded a pint of ice cream with a spoon frozen into it from somebody's last bad night, and he ate that too, standing, the cold blooming behind his eyes.
His body had rules and the rules were gone. For years eating had been a negotiation he lost daily, each spoonful a debt collected by Hank or Niles or the house's ambient watching. Now there was nobody watching and the hunger had teeth, and he fed it everything the kitchen had. Cereal from the box, milk straight after from the carton. Cold cuts folded in quarters. An apple that had gone soft, eaten down to nothing anyway.
He didn't taste most of it past the pierogis. That was the part nobody told you, he thought dimly, loading the last of the bread with the last of the butter. Past a certain point it stopped being food and became arithmetic, the act itself, jaw working, swallow after swallow, the warm heavy pressure building under his ribs. The pressure was the point somehow. It filled something. It sat in him like evidence.
Then the pressure turned.
It came slowly, then all at once, his stomach stretched taut and complaining, the warmth curdling into sickness so heavy he had to put a hand on the counter. He looked down at the wreckage, the empty bags, the ice cream carton, the pierogi pot, and his body did the accounting his brain refused. Too much. Far, far too much.
The bathroom was down the hall. He walked there quietly, socked feet on the floorboards, the house still asleep behind him. He locked the door and stood at the toilet and his hands were shaking, different from this morning's shakes, worse.
He knew how this worked. He'd known for years, the way you know things you've never done, from watching, from the shape of the secret in other people. He'd never done it. He'd held that line through everything Amanda did, through every bad year, told himself the line was proof of something.
He knelt at the toilet and put two fingers in his throat and brought it up.
It came hard, violent, his whole body seizing around it, eyes streaming, the burn climbing his throat like a lit rope. He heaved again and again, gripping the bowl, and it kept coming, the eggs, the bread, the cold rice coming back up sharp with soy sauce, all of it, everything the hunger had demanded, surrendered in reverse.
When it slowed he spat, rinsed his mouth from the tap, spat again. His reflection in the mirror over the sink was a stranger with a red face and wet eyes. He didn't look at the eyes. He looked at the tap running and thought, with a clarity that felt like falling, that the pressure was gone. The unbearable fullness had drained out of him and left something behind that was worse and quieter and familiar, and he understood with total precision why people did this more than once.
The line he'd held was already behind him.
He flushed, twice. He ran the sink full and the fan, and chewed gum from the coat pocket of someone's jacket hanging on the door. He scrubbed his hands with soap past the wrist. The toilet bowl had spat water onto the seat and he wiped it with toilet paper until there was nothing, and rolled the paper into the trash under other trash.
"You okay in there?" Niles's voice, through the door, close. Too close. His knock, two knuckles, soft.
"Yeah." His voice came out fine. He was surprised at how fine. "Showering later. Give me a minute."
"Rough smoke?"
"Something like that."
A pause. Niles's weight shifted outside the door, floorboard creaking. He'd watched Gavin lie through that same door frame a hundred times, and here was Connor doing it, and Connor could hear him deciding not to know.
"There's coffee," Niles said finally.
"Give me ten."
The footsteps went away. Connor sat down on the edge of the tub, on his hands, and breathed. His throat burned. His stomach was empty in the way he'd wanted it empty for years and it felt like a victory and a dead thing at the same time, and he pressed his palms hard against the tub edge until the pain in his hands gave him something else to count.
In the kitchen, Niles stood over the wreckage.
The counter, the table, the floor by the sink. Every empty container told a story in order, a binge reconstructed like a crime scene, and Niles stood there with the coffee pot half lifted and did the math on a person he'd spent two years trying to feed. Seven spoonfuls at midnight. This, by seven forty.
He heard the bathroom door open down the hall and put the pot down and said nothing, and watched his brother come into the kitchen gray-faced, gum working in his jaw, reaching for a mug like a man walking past a car alarm he'd set off himself.
"Big night for the kitchen," Niles said. Neutral. Carefully, expensively neutral.
"I got hungry." Connor poured coffee. His hand was steady. He'd made it steady. "The pierogis were freezer burned anyway. You should toss the rest."
"Right."
"What?"
"Nothing," Niles said, and picked up the ice cream carton, and didn't look at his brother's face while he did it, and threw it in the trash, and the lid came down on it soft.
The lid had barely settled before Connor's shoulders came up around his ears.
"You can just say it."
"Say what."
"That I'm disgusting. That I ate like an animal while everyone slept. Go on, you've been doing the face since I walked in."
Niles set the coffee pot down harder than he meant to. "I've been doing no face."
"You threw out my ice cream."
"It was empty, Connor. It was a carton with a spoon in it."
"It was mine." His voice cracked on the word and he hated it instantly, heard the child in it, kept going anyway. "You don't get to decide what's mine to throw out. You've known me two years, Niles. Two. You missed the rest."
The kitchen went very quiet. Niles's jaw worked, the muscle jumping under the skin.
"Don't," he said, low. "Don't do that. Don't put Amanda's years in your mouth at me like I wasn't the one tearing the country apart looking for you."
"You found me too late to have an opinion. That's the deal. You get the wreckage, you don't get the map."
"Jesus Christ." Niles dragged a hand down his face. "You eat the whole kitchen and I'm the bad guy for not clapping."
"You said 'big night for the kitchen.' I heard the tone. Everyone hears the tone."
"Because I was scared, you idiot." It came out louder than he wanted, bouncing off the cupboards. "I stood here doing math. Seven spoonfuls at midnight, a warehouse by dawn, and then forty minutes locked in the bathroom with the fan running. I'm not stupid, Connor. I grew up with you. I know what the fan's for."
Connor's coffee mug stopped halfway to his mouth.
The silence stretched, taut, structural. Somewhere in the walls a pipe ticked. When Connor set the mug down his hand was doing the shake again, the real one, the one he couldn't fake either direction.
"You don't know what it's for," he said. "You think you know. You've been around Gavin too long, you think you're fluent, and you're not. You don't know a single thing about what it's like in my head."
"I know you look like a sieve with a hoodie on."
"And I know you'd rather I threw it all up quietly than made a mess you had to look at."
"That's not..."
"It is. It's exactly it. Nobody in this house can stand watching me eat, so this is the compromise, alright? This is what I came up with. You should be thanking me."
Niles grabbed the counter with both hands like the room had tilted. "Thanking you. For what. For the toilet you're ruining? For the teeth you're going to lose at twenty-five?"
"For not making you watch."
The words landed and sat there. Niles opened his mouth and nothing came out that wasn't going to break something, so he stood there breathing through his nose, and the breathing got louder and faster, and Connor watched his brother come apart by degrees in a kitchen full of his own empty containers.
"You know what I was doing when you got taken?" Niles said finally. "I was buying groceries. Every week. For a kid who wasn't there. I'd fill the cart and stand in the checkout line thinking, this week, this week he comes home and the fridge is full. Years of it, Connor. Carts of food for nobody. So don't tell me I don't get the map. I've been standing in the map my whole..."
The stairs creaked.
Hank came down in the t-shirt and socks, empty glass in his hand, filling the doorway, and stopped. He looked at Niles white-knuckled on the counter. He looked at Connor gray-faced next to a graveyard of packaging. The air in the kitchen was still ringing.
"So," Hank said.
Nobody answered.
"Somebody want to tell me why my kitchen looks like a raccoon broke in, and why my two boys are about to come to blows over an ice cream carton."
"It's nothing," Connor said.
"That's the third nothing I've heard in this house before nine a.m. and the first two put a man in St. Mary's." Hank set the glass in the sink with a clack. He crossed to the trash, lifted the lid, and looked. Then he looked at Connor, a long flat look that had twenty years of reading liars in it.
"Forty minutes in the bathroom this morning," Hank said. "Fan running."
Connor's face went through three things and settled on blank.
"Don't," Connor said.
"I'm not doing anything. I'm making an observation."
"You don't get to..." Connor's voice climbed, cracking. "You're a drunk. You've been a drunk the whole time I've known you, half your blood is whiskey, and you want to stand there and..."
"Yeah," Hank said. Simple. No flinch. "I am. Nobody's held a press conference about it. Doesn't change what I'm looking at."
"You don't know what you're looking at."
"Kid, I was a detective for thirty years." Hank's voice stayed level, which made it worse. "And I watched you eat seven spoonfuls last night like it was labor. And I watched you not look at me when I took the can away. And this morning my kitchen's been through a wood chipper and my boy comes out of the bathroom looking like he ran here from the airport."
"I'm fine."
"You're not fine."
"I'm FINE." The word came out of him raw, and then he was breathing hard, cornered, hands flat on the table, staring at the wood grain. "You want the truth? You want it? I ate everything because for one morning I was hungry. One morning. First time in six years. And then there was too much and the too much was worse than nothing, it was unbearable, it was sitting on my chest, and I got rid of it. Once. One time. That's the whole story."
The kitchen absorbed it. Niles had gone still against the counter, eyes closed.
"Once," Hank repeated.
"Once."
"Okay." Hank nodded slowly. He pulled out a chair, the old wooden one, and sat down in it with a creak, elbows on the table, which brought him down to nobody's level in particular. "Then it's a Friday thing. Like the pipe. Special occasions."
"That's not..."
"You said it yourself. Nobody in this house can watch you eat. Fine. I've watched worse people than you do worse things than you, for longer, and they're all still upright. But I'm not going to stand in this kitchen and play dumb, because I'm bad at it and you're worse at spotting it."
Connor sat down across from him. Not because he chose to. His legs made the decision.
"You're not going to fix it," Connor said, quieter. "You know that. There's no fixing this. Gavin doesn't get fixed. You don't get fixed."
"Yeah, I know how it works." Hank turned the empty glass a quarter turn on the table. "But here's a thing I learned late. You don't fix it. You just keep somebody in the room. That's the whole program. Somebody in the room who knows."
"That's it? That's your thirty years of wisdom?"
"That's it. Cheaper than therapy and it works about as often."
Niles laughed, once, wetly, from the counter. He came over and took the third chair, and the three of them sat around the wrecked kitchen table in the gray morning light, the empty containers between them like casualties.
"Someone should wake Gavin," Niles said. "He'd want to be here for the group therapy portion."
"Gavin needs to sleep," Hank said. "Gavin ripped his own IV out of his hand two days ago. If Gavin comes down this stairs I'm stapling him to the couch."
"He'd love that. He'd frame it."
"Shut up about Gavin." Connor put his head down on his arms, all at once, the exhaustion landing like a dropped weight. "Just... someone put coffee in front of me and nobody talk for ten minutes."
Hank got up and poured it. Set the mug by his brother's folded arms. Then he sat back down and looked out the window at the yard, and drank nothing, and let the ten minutes run.
Halfway through it, Connor's hand came off the table and found the mug. He drank it black, in silence, with both of them watching the window and not him, which was as close to mercy as this kitchen knew how to make.